Wikimedia said that they were very impressed with MarkMonitor. Wikimedia has been looking to switch from GoDaddy this past December. MarkMonitor is a U.S. based registrar with an office in San Francisco and is experienced with managing high-traffic domains.

“Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table,” said Gardner. “If they are not at the table, we don’t benefit from their crumb.” Some of the disparities are quite noticeable. For example, the article on The Sopranos is chock-full of information but each article on Sex and the City has a brief summary of each episode.

“I think more and more people everywhere are recognizing the impact Wikipedia has made on their lives– the rapid rise in donations this year is the response,” stated Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson Moka Pantages. “It’s now the go-to place for anything you need to know. These donations are thousands of people all over the world expressing gratitude and supporting the efforts of the Wikipedians who work long and hard to keep this thing alive and growing.”

Another reason for Wikimedia’s growth is because they started using a banner that features the face of Jimmy Wales. In the infographic below, you will notice the amount of donations that were provided as a click-through from their different banners.

[ReadWriteWeb]

The Wikimedia Foundation has received a $2 million grant from Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG).  Google provided the investment through the Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund of Tides Foundation. “Wikipedia is one of the greatest triumphs of the internet,” stated Google co-founder Sergey Brin. “This vast repository of community-generated content is an invaluable resource to anyone who is online.”  The Wikimedia Foundation operates several websites including Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikinews, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource.

[WikiMedia press release]

Wales also revealed some interesting numbers about Wikipedia.  To maintain Wikipedia, it costs around $10 million per year.  The website survives primarily off of donations.  So far Wikipedia has over $3 million in donations for the year.

Personally I’m impressed by how little it costs to maintain Wikipedia.  On a per day basis, it costs about $27,397.26 to keep Wikipedia running.

What about some of the other top websites?  As a comparison, YouTube costs about $2 million per day in just storage and bandwidth.  Facebook most likely costs close to $300,000 per day considering that they are hosting 10 billion photos.  In 2007 and early 2008, Facebook spent around $67 million on rackable servers.  Facebook most likely spends $500 million per year between servers, employee salaries, infrastructure, office space, and other miscellaneous costs.

Below is a video of the interview [via BusinessInsider]:

For those of you that do not like the current design of Wikipedia, there is some good news.  The Wikimedia team is working on a new design for the website and if you have an account on Wikipedia, you can check it out.  There is a new beta skin/theme that makes Wikipedia look a little bit more glossier and with less of a traditional look and feel.

Anyone that visits a Wikipedia page will notice a link that says “Try Beta” on the top right.  But having an account is required to enable the “Vector” skin.  Editing Wikipedia becomes a lot easier with the new beta skin too.  The English version of Wikipedia has 2.979 million articles in their database as of right now.

“Have you noticed the “Try Beta” link on the top of Wikimedia project sites?  The usability team is proud to introduce the new skin, Vector, and the enhanced toolbar.   Well, they have been available from user preferences over a month now, but we wanted to reach out to anonymous users.  Please check it out and let us know your thought, if you haven’t tried already,” stated Wikimedia Usability Initiative employee Naoko Komura.

[via LifeHacker]

While there was a lot of hype built around Wikia’s search, the company insists that it is merely an alpha release and the search result quality will be low initially.  Michael Arrington’s review did not go favorably for the product, thus causing Wales to respond personally.  The debate is that Wikia was supposed to be a Google killer, but the alpha does not look impressive.

Release early, release often.

It’s a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine. We’ve been telling everyone that constantly. I’m sorry Michael’s disappointed, but having said that, we didn’t build it for him, but for people who think that openness, transparency, and participation are more important than slick releases.

When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”. On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What’s this? There’s nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia, it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!

So the comparison to Google on day one is just mistaken. Google didn’t launch a project to build a human-powered search engine, they launched an algorithmic search engine with a clever new idea. So they didn’t have to wait for the humans to come in and start building it.

We aren’t even running with a real index yet, just a placeholder index. Yeah, the search sucks today. But that’s not the point. The point is that we are building something different.

-Jimmy Wales [comment on TechCrunch post linked above]

Just for reiteration, the difference between Wikia and Google upon early release is that the founders of Google found out how to download and index the Internet before releasing their search engine as mentioned in the book, The Google Story.  Wikia simply released with low quality to finally let the open source community flood in, go to work on the site, and create quality search results.  I first wrote about Wikia in December 2006 when the name was speculated to be Wikiasari.

I’ll hold off on reviewing Wikia Search in depth because it still has a lot of growing to do.  Wikipedia didn’t become the biggest open source encyclopedia a day after it went into public alpha, but now its the #9 most visited web site according to Alexa.  I’m not in the position to judge anything just yet.  This blog post is to just make people aware that the release is officially open.

According to Wikipedia, Wikipedia “receives over 2000 page requests per second. More than 100 servers have been set up to handle the traffic.” Less than a quarter of Wikipedia’s traffic is accounted for by non-registered users who are not likely to be article contributors. In the 4th quarter of 2005, the cost to keep Wikipedia online was $321,000 with server costs accounting for roughly 60%.

About 5 days ago, I had found a post on StartupSquad about an upcoming search engine called Wikiasari was being developed by Jimmy Wales. StartupSquad and Pulse 2.0 wrote that Amazon was involved with the project development. A comment by Jimmy Wales himself on our post pointed out that this information was inaccurate. Then similar incorrect information was written on TechCrunch and Mashable.

Now that I know that Jimmy Wales reads our blog, I’d like to personally congratulate him on the large donation that was given to the Wikimedia Fundraising C.O.R.E.